Last Friday night I went to see the Chilean film The Maid (La nana) and, as often seems to happen when I go to Friday night movies at the Angelika, the director, Sebastián Silva, popped in to take questions after the film. This is his second film, and it’s surprisingly fantastic. It follows Raquel, a maid who has been with the same family for twenty years, as she is on the cusp of unwilling change.
Having been raised in a culture in which household help is relatively uncommon, I find the concept a bit off-putting. I spent a summer living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea five years ago, where we Westerners were expected to hire help to clean and garden. It felt so strange to pay the equivalent of about $5 per week to a woman who came in and cleaned my small house, which barely got dirty because I was never there anyhow. We couldn’t speak to one another too easily – I spoke very broken Pidgin (which is broken to begin with) and had to leave my English-Pidgin dictionary by the door. And since I’m more than capable of cleaning up after myself, my American-ness kept telling me there was no reason to pay someone to do something I could easily do myself. Except that in as bad an economy as PNG’s, we were just trying to do something for the locals. Still, it rankled.
In any case, Silva explained the prevalence of this kind of live-in household help in his native Chile (Raquel, in fact, is modeled on the actual Raquel who was the maid in his family). Maids are often the member of the household ignored until they’re not there. In Raquel’s case, the family has come to rely on her so heavily that the idea of living without her is preposterous, as if someone casually suggested selling the teenager to another family. They do the cooking and the cleaning, and often do the less exalted work involved in raising the children.
One could say a lot about the film, but I don’t want to give too much away – it is well worth seeing (or renting, if it doesn’t make it to your neck of the woods). But part of its genius is in its off-kilter storytelling. You fully expect Raquel to break out a knife and murder someone, though you’re never sure why. Perhaps it’s the camerawork that could, I suppose, vaguely recall low-budget horror films. It takes almost the entire film for us to get inside Raquel’s head, and it’s hard to tell if she is mildly psychotic or childlike or just plain confused. It takes a rare talent to help your audience move from hatred to pity to love, but Silva does it for us.
There’s also a fair amount of various maids – Raquel and others who cycle through the household – showering or otherwise unsexily naked onscreen. The first time, I didn’t think too much of it; after that, it started to feel gratuitous. (Nudity for nudity’s sake seems usually comes across as a cheap, desperate trick of the underfunded.) But when asked about the nudity, Silva explained that maids are often looked through – that they are like furniture, unseen until they are needed or gone. By contrast, he said, showing the women naked in their more private moments forcefully reminds us that they are women before they are hired help, with very human needs and emotions and fears and joys.
That’s the best explanation for nudity I’ve ever heard. Silva’s The Maid is, at its core, a very human film. He showed it to a group of Chilean maids, he said, who spent a lot of time afterwards discussing their problems as a group and brainstorming ways to improve their station. In fact, Raquel left her job with his family shortly after seeing her film, and lives in a city, but remains close with the family. Can a film inspire an often-marginalized segment of society toward a better existence? It would appear so.